2005:December

If you’re observant, you might have noticed two distinct icons appearing before links in my posts. These serve as a visual indication on where the links go to. Links without icons are normal external links, that is, they link outside the blog. Links with a Roman ’W’ inside a square icon are external links to Wikipedia articles. Wikipedia is special since I frequently link to it. Finally, links with the v9 icon link to other pages within this blog, typically to other posts.

There’s supposedly much ado on Joel’s Spolsky’s article, “The Perils of JavaSchools” (via Tim Bray). The violect reactions seem to come from people who interpreted Joel’s piece as a denigration of schools that teach Java instead of C/C++. It’s actually a denigration of schools that don’t teach pointers and recursion, two things that Joel believes necessarily (though not sufficiently) indicate whether a programmer is excellent instead of just good enough.

Tim Berners-Lee has a blog! If you don’t know who he is, then you either probably haven’t read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons, or you haven’t carefully read Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons. For the still clueless, he’s the reason you’re reading this blog entry now; he’s the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Recently tried out Globe’sFamily/Friend tracker service, which they newly promoted. The locations it gives me were, while technically correct, can be misleading. I wouldn’t have tried the service if it weren’t for my mom who asked to enroll me so she can supposedly track me.

I just finished a short, but thought-provoking, piece of fiction God’s Debris: A Thought Experiment, which was written by Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, way back in 2001. The novel is a Socratic method discussion on who is God and why we are here. The first link above points to a page where you can download a free PDF format of the book.